Trotsky Quote

[Coggeh]

"The antagonism between the workers as consumers and the peasants as producers and sellers of bread lay, in the main, at the root of these conflicts."

Now this may sound stupid , but does this quote have a deep rooting ?

Its the first I've heard of it being put this way , as the reason why people are conscientiously trapped in the mindset that they are not workers but consumers.That they never or find it extremely hard to think of themselves as the ones providing the services but think of themselves more in the sense that their the ones using the services .

Could this also mean that people look upon strikes sometimes as a bad thing , that working class people see strikes as if their somehow hurting other people ?

[BobKKKindle$]

This quote comes from a document entitled 'Hue and Cry over Kronstadt' written in 1938, and relates to 'the years of the revolution' by which Trotsky presumably means the civil war, following the Bolshevik insurrection in 1917.

I don't think Trotsky intended the comment to have a meaning any deeper than what is obvious: during the Civil War, the state used grain requisitioning, without sufficient compensation, in order to ensure that workers, and soldiers fighting against the forces opposed to the workers' state, had sufficient food. The Peasants naturally wanted to be given some form of remuneration in exchange for their produce, but because the state took everything beyond a personal consumption limit of one ton, the peasantry lost any incentive to produce more than the basic minimum, and, in some cases, rose against the worker's state, as in the case of the Tambov revolt. As such, we can see that during this period, and for some time after, a hostile class antagonism developed between the working class and the peasantry.

EDIT: The Worker's state, not the bourgeoisie! Whoops!

Interestingly, in the same document, Trotsky wrote:

"Under the pressure of need and deprivation, the workers themselves were episodically divided into hostile camps, depending upon stronger or weaker ties with the village. The Red Army also found itself under the influence of the countryside. During the years of the civil war it was necessary more than once to disarm discontented regiments."

Clearly, the working class was not a single homogenous group.